“When you quit drinking you stop waiting.”

“When you hear nothing about the body, he suggests, you stop listening to it, and feeling it; you stop experiencing it as a worthy, integrated entity.”

“The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.”

“One thing I've noticed since I quit drinking is that a person usually has two or three sets of impulses scratching away at some internal door at any given time. If you're sober--if you're alert, and paying attention to those impulses, and not yielding to the instinct to anesthetize them--you can receive a lot of guidance about where to go, what to do next in life.”

“But then the wine came, one glass and then a second glass. And somewhere during that second drink, the switch was flipped. The wine gave me a melting feeling, a warm light sensation in my head, and I felt like safety itself had arrived in that glass, poured out from the bottle and allowed to spill out between us.”

“To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.”

“Your needs are overwhelming? You can’t depend on yourself or others to meet them? You don’t even know what they are? Then need nothing.”